The fundamental problem addressed by this invention is the rigidity constraining current business intelligence systems. Their initial development, complexity and maintenance overheads make for very expensive implementations, and daunting end-user experiences. They require a pipeline of specialist expertise in the business domain, data warehousing, and OLAP development arenas. Furthermore, any changes in requirements from end-users necessitate the involvement of many of these experts for a further duration.
Traditional BI implementations are bespoke development efforts that are purely service-based. The creations are typically unique to each business and are not reusable. This criticism is true of most B I systems that are currently available.
USA Patent specification 20070078823 is designed for application developers without business intelligence expertise, to provide black-box multidimensional expression generators for application development purposes. A business intelligence expert creates these reusable black-boxes that the developer can compile into their application. The expression generators are composable.
Recent patents generally address issues that are encountered in extracting data through queries. USA patent application 2008/0294596 deals with the conversion of a query that has combined hierarchical dimensions into data source specific queries by generating context expressions according to the hierarchy.
USA patent application 2008/0005689 provides a system that stores executable instructions to graphically display file object attributes of one or more file objects.
EP2056194 discloses executable instructions to receive a request for an action. A set of meta data is searched for meta data corresponding to the action and the search is limited by the action context.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,457,810 improves SQL queries by providing an XML wrapper that queries an XML document in an on-the-fly manner so that only parent nodes in the document that satisfy the query are extracted.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,296,040 discloses a method to automatically derive relationships between query subjects and query items to avoid double counting.
USA patent application 20090030915 discloses a method of determining a driving factor for a data value of interest by collecting a context for the data value of interest in the multidimensional database.
Reporting and summarizing data is only one aspect of analysis. Frequently, reports must be forward-looking, and meaningful forecasts are essential for effectively planning and running a modern organization. While there are powerful tools available to perform complex statistical analysis, they are generic in nature and require a fair degree of mathematical sophistication to operate. Combined with this, the operator must also possess a deep knowledge of the business domain to be effective.
One object of this invention is to address the need to make these powerful analytical tools available to business users. Another object is to provide a BI system that is affordable for smaller businesses and that reduces the reliance on experts.